Posts Tagged ‘Canada’

Dave De Castro—The Bandit—passed away earlier this month. A proud Trinidadian who began performing in Canada in the mid-1950s, Bandit was named that country’s first Calypso Monarch at the inaugural Caribana calypso competition in 1969.

He was a lovely, big-hearted man and a natural raconteur, funny, gracious, and generous with his time and his memories. He loved life and loved his family, and to the end he was fervently devoted the art of calypso. My sympathies to all his friends and loved ones.

Granted, Mary Churchill was no Princess Margaret. But on a tour of Auxiliary Territorial Service training camps, she did at least profess to enjoy calypso once. Let me recycle part of an earlier post, itself excerpted from my essay “Calypso’s Cosmopolitan Strategy” (the context: a discussion of Canadians’ determination to see West Indians as happy, loyal subjects of the Empire):

Globe and Mail, 21 August 1943

But it was a front-page, above-the-fold photo in the Globe and Mail in the summer of 1943 that truly spotlighted West Indians’ devotion to their martial Mother Country. A teaser for a two-column story on the paper’s Women’s page, the picture illustrated a visit to Canada by servicewoman Mary Churchill (daughter of Winston), and featured a smiling, down-to-earth Churchill “[singing] calypso songs” amidst a group of dark-skinned Barbadian volunteers at the Auxiliary Territorial Services basic training camp in Kitchener, Ontario. The photo-op with the West Indians, who accounted for precisely forty-seven of the camp’s 1000 trainees, was framed as the centerpiece of the story, which climaxed with the “girls” (including “Subaltern” [!] Churchill) in an impromptu performance of one of their “native” songs, clear evidence of their childlike trust in the Great White Mother:

There was a moment of shyness on the part of [the] girls from the British West Indies…when Miss Churchill appeared on the scene. But when she sat on the grass, gathering them around her and chattering as naturally as if she knew each one, they were soon laughing hard and telling her all about themselves….

When Ptc. M. K. Evelyn from the Barbados sang a native calypso, Miss Churchill joined in the chorus heartily. “It’s simply marvelous!” she said, clapping her hands. “I wish we could have had a recording of it!”[1]

The Globe and Mail‘s focus wasn’t unique. A Canadian Press story (“Mary Churchill Helps CWACS With Singsong”) made it out as if the “[t]awny-haired, blue-eyed” Churchill might even have inspired the melodic outbreak through sheer force of personality: “Within 15 minutes of her arrival,” the story led off, the twenty-year-old Churchill had the “girls…from the West Indies at their ease and a calypso sing-song rolling.” The wire service even mentioned by name the calypsos on which she joined in: Lord Invader’s “Small Island” (“So, Small Island: go back where you really come from!”) and something called “One Sunday Morning.” The latter must have been Atilla the Hun’s grandiloquent “Graf Zeppelin,” which begins: “One Sunday morning, I chanced to hear / A rumbling and a tumbling in the atmosphere”—as if their illustrious visitor from that small island off the coast of Europe were being compared to a stately blimp descending from out of the blue. Maybe Ptc. Evelyn’s choices were innocent. (The CP specified that Elaine de Gannes of Trinidad also took part in the selection.) But if not, then those West Indian “girls” really did have something to laugh hard about.

This week, Toronto’s West Indian community has been remembering the life and work of veteran civil rights activist Charles Roach, who died Tuesday at age 79. By all accounts a lovely and elegant man—and a tenacious and eloquent campaigner for racial and social justice—the Trinidad native was also a driving force in the development of Caribana. (I previously mentioned Roach in connection with his efforts to abolish Canada’s loyalty oath to the British monarch.)

Canadians also marked the passing on September 30th of figure-skating legend Barbara Ann Scott, a national icon in the late 1940s and early 50s. In her peak year of 1948, “Canada’s Sweetheart” was a repeat national, European, and World champion; Olympic gold medalist in the ladies’ singles competition; and subject of a Time magazine cover story.

And of a calypso by Lord Caresser. By March 1948, Caresser was near the end of a two-year tenure as the star of his own weekly radio show on the CBC. (See “Caresser in Canada” and “Student Calypsonians in Canada.”) He had probably composed his “Ode to Barbara Ann Scott” on the occasion of her triumphant return to her birthplace of Ottawa in 1947, when thousands came out to celebrate Scott’s championships and present her with the key to the city. But of course it would have made perfect sense to dust off the “Ode” for a second round of parades and ceremonies after Scott’s Olympic triumph in 1948—which is precisely what Caresser did for his broadcast of March 3d, adapting a stanza as part of his “Weekly News” feature:

(The audio excerpt from the March 3, 1948 broadcast of “The Lord Caresser Show” is in the public domain. Its copyright has expired because it was created under Crown copyright and first published more than 50 years ago. The copyright to “An Ode to Barbara Ann Scott” is held by the heirs of Rufus Callender, and the work is reproduced by their kind permission.)

With all the hoopla this week surrounding Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee, it’s worth remembering that there are plenty of folks throughout her dominions who aren’t celebrating (or who, like Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, just aren’t happy being someone else’s “minion”). In the Dominion of Canada, for example, veteran civil rights activist Charles Roach has long sought to alter that country’s Citizenship Oath, which requires new citizens to swear allegiance to the British monarch (who is technically the Canadian head of state). Because of his refusal to take such a pledge, the Trini-born Roach, who has lived in Canada since 1955, remains a permanent resident rather than a citizen. Although his legal challenges to the oath were rejected by a federal appeals court in 1994 and by the Ontario Superior Court in 2007, Roach, a member of the bar since 1963, is now once again arguing its constitutionality before the provincial court.

A story about this latest round in his fight (which he’s effectively conducting from his sickbed, battling cancer and stroke at the same time) appeared last Wednesday in the right-wing National Post—and immediately drew a handful of hair-raising comments from unreconstructed Monarchists and United Empire Loyalists suggesting that if they don’t like it in Canada, Roach and the rest of “these immigrants” ought to go back to the “hell holes” they came from.

In spite of its much-vaunted multiculturalism, Canada has a history of such bigotry, state-sponsored as well as petulant and personal (see “Domesticating the West Indies in Canada,” Part 1 and Part 2). If immigrants insist on coming, some Canadians have felt, then it would be much more tolerable if they would just shut up and wave their flag (Union Jack, not Maple Leaf).

…To begin with, Canadians had long delighted in noting what they regarded as West Indians’ touching loyalty to the British monarchy, especially as expressed in calypso. A newsreel in the collection of Canada’s National Library shows Prince Edward being saluted by “calypso dancers” on his 1925 tour of the Caribbean. In 1939, a Canadian Press newswire story in the Toronto Star remarked that six months on, the calypsonians then in residence at “Manhattan’s smartest night clubs” were still “singing sprightly ballads to rhumba-like rhythms about the [recent North American] visit of the King and Queen,” and it approvingly cited a sample stanza: “The charming, gracious, and smiling Queen, / Is the prettiest woman I have ever seen. / She was dress in an outfit of blue, / And wave to the crowd as the car drove through.” (A similar notice in late 1953 marking Elizabeth’s first visit to the Caribbean jovially quoted from the calypso that greeted her arrival in Jamaica, “Hip Hooray for de Gracious Queen.”)

These dispatches were nothing, however, compared to the flood of coverage that accompanied Princess Margaret on her month-long circuit of the Caribbean in 1955—the “Calypso Tour,” as it came to be known throughout the English-speaking world. All of Canada’s major newspapers featured front-page stories replete with lavish photo spreads and maps of Margaret’s itinerary, beginning in the run-up to her arrival and continuing well past her return. “Trinidad’s Steel Bands Prepare for Princess,” shouted a headline in the Globe and Mail on January 31: “Each band hopes to win approval and be chosen to play for the Princess.” Indeed, claimed the Toronto Star, the “happy natives” of Trinidad, particularly its “colorfully garbed native dancers,” had been anxiously preparing for her visit for months. Meanwhile, the Globe divulged, “Calypso writers have already produced a torrent of words extolling the virtues of the Royal visitor,” and one, the Mighty Panther (Vernon Roberts), had been chosen to “put his message across personally at a carnival in the grounds of Government House.” (The paper reproduced the entire text of Panther’s laudatory lyrics in the next day’s edition.)

Calypso’s wartime displays of loyalty to Crown and Empire came in for special treatment. A plummy profile of Caresser in the entertainment weekly Applause tried to establish his patriotic bona fides with the spurious claim that he had served in the army, entertaining the troops—British, American, or West Indian, it wasn’t clear. “Many a soldier who blithely ignored the printed V.D. notices was sent scurrying to the medico by Caresser’s warbled warnings,” it grinned, “and the progress of the war was duly noted [by Caresser] in numbers such as ‘Hitler and the Rich Ukraine,’ [and] ‘Watch Out, Japan.’”[1]

Globe and Mail, 21 August 1943

But it was a front-page, above-the-fold photo in the Globe and Mail in the summer of 1943 that truly spotlighted West Indians’ devotion to their martial Mother Country. A teaser for a two-column story on the paper’s Women’s page, the picture illustrated a visit to Canada by servicewoman Mary Churchill (daughter of Winston), and featured a smiling, down-to-earth Churchill “[singing] calypso songs” amidst a group of dark-skinned Barbadian volunteers at the Auxiliary Territorial Services basic training camp in Kitchener, Ontario. The photo-op with the West Indians, who accounted for precisely forty-seven of the camp’s 1000 trainees, was framed as the centerpiece of the story, which climaxed with the “girls” (including “Subaltern” [!] Churchill) in an impromptu performance of one of their “native” songs, clear evidence of their childlike trust in the Great White Mother:

There was a moment of shyness on the part of [the] girls from the British West Indies…when Miss Churchill appeared on the scene. But when she sat on the grass, gathering them around her and chattering as naturally as if she knew each one, they were soon laughing hard and telling her all about themselves….

When Ptc. M. K. Evelyn from the Barbados sang a native calypso, Miss Churchill joined in the chorus heartily. “It’s simply marvelous!” she said, clapping her hands. “I wish we could have had a recording of it!”[2]

[2] Tupper, Jan. “Keeping Pace With Father Easy, Says Mary Churchill.” Globe and Mail 21 August 1943: 10. The story’s bad faith is compounded by the wartime files of the Immigration Branch at Library and Archives Canada, which are filled with hundreds of rejected applications by West Indian men who wished to come to Canada and train with the armed services. “[T]he Royal Canadian Air Force hesitates to encourage [Applicant X] to make the long and expensive trip from Port of Spain, Trinidad, in view of the possibility that he may either fail to qualify for enlistment or that his enlistment cannot be effected as a result of the requirements being filled,” went a typically mealy-mouthed reply to a query on an aspiring serviceman’s behalf. “If [X] should decide to come to Canada [to a Recruiting Centre], the journey must be made at his own expense with no assurance that he will be accepted into the Royal Canadian Air Force…” (RG 76, File 471, Item 721432).

See also Gordon Rohlehr on “Calypso and the Ideology of Empire” (pp. 182-6) and “World War II and Its Aftermath” (esp. pp. 316-355) in Calypso & Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad, as well as Ray Funk’s discussion of “reverential” royal-themed calypsos in his “In the Battle for Emergent Independence” in Anthurium 3.2 (2005).

1969 Canadian Calypso King Dave “Bandit” De Castro’s YouTube debut earlier this week (see below) inspired me to dig out the telephone interview I had with him back in December 2009, when I was living in Ontario.

There may not be much here that isn’t already in De Castro’s memoir, Stories, self-published earlier in 2009 from his home in Florida. But “Bandit” is a delightful storyteller and a gregarious interviewee, and his recollections of the early history of calypso in Canada in the 1950s and 60s, in particular, deserve a wider audience. And so here is more or less the entire interview, a brief excerpt of which appeared in a previous post:

Let me get you to start at the beginning, at least in terms of Canada. Remind me—I think you told me this once before—when did you come to Canada?

I came to Canada in 1955, April of 1955.

And did you land in Montreal, or somewhere else?

Yes, we landed in Montreal. We came to New York first, and then came to Montreal.

What brought you here, exactly?

A friend of mine told me that there was a lot of exciting things going on in Canada, and I was very restless in Trinidad, and he wanted a buddy to go with him, and I said “Okay, you make the arrangements, and I’ll go.”

So did you come on a tourist visa, or…?

No, no, no: we applied—in those days it was very easy [for white residents of the Commonwealth] to get citizenship in Canada. We applied for citizenship, and it came back within six months, and because I worked for a shipping company in Trinidad, we were able to book a passage on the S.S. Argentina to New York, and then from New York we took a Greyhound to Montreal. In those days, we had no problems coming to Canada at all.

Were you a musician in Trinidad?

No, I was not. I graduated from Mount St. Benedict, one of the colleges in Trinidad, it was a boarding school, and then after that…well my father, my stepfather, as a matter of fact, was a cricketer for the West Indies, and I saw a lot of pictures of him playing in England and Australia and that kind of stuff. So I always had a little bit of a bug to travel, growing up. I figured, “I want to see these places.” So when the first opportunity came along, I sold my motorbike, gave up my job, and away we went.

So how did you get started playing and singing?

Well, how the band started, actually, is: because we were a little lonely, of course—I was one of the first guys in the old days to go to Canada; they didn’t have too many other West Indians then—so eventually, some other West Indians moved into the area and we found out that they were living [there] and that some of the boys were going to the University of Montreal [and McGill]. So we started to make [music] with West Indian guys—there was a little place on Milton Street, a guy had a little apartment, and we would meet there and have a few drinks and play music and beat bottle and spoon and, you know, just fool around. And then a guy from Trinidad, a guy called Ken Duval came up—these guys just kept arriving and they ended up at my door for some reason, they would say “Go see Dave, go see Dave,” I don’t know why, I never knew that—so Ken comes and I say, “What are you doing here?” and he says, “Well, I’m from Trinidad,” and I say “What’s that got to do with me?” “They send me to see you!”

Right, yes, I read that book! Exact same situation. And this guy Ken Duval, he could play the cuatro. So he started playing the cuatro and we started beating bottles and spoons and that kind of stuff, and then a guy, his brother-in-law, could play a little bit of guitar, a guy called Alan de Montbrun. So he joined up, too, and before you know it, there was another guy called Eddy Edgehill, he could play a little bit of a conga drum, and I was very good at the maracas and the congo and the bottle and spoon, and that kind of stuff, and so we started this little band. Calypso was unknown at that time, really, but it was something different. And then we added to it a little steelband section, with one steel pan, a little four-note bass drum and a thirteen-note guitar pan…when I talk about a four-note bass drum, you have to realize now that a bass section in Trinidad right now is about fifteen different drums with about 32 notes. So it’s a whole different ballgame. And we were doing all this thing and a guy saw us and he said, “this guy have an agent, a friend of mine, and maybe he might be interested in you guys,” and we said “right,” and he came, and he saw potential, and he said, “You guys—yeah, I can make some money with you guys. I can dress you up, put you in shirts, frilly shirts to look like Desi Arnaz—I can make some money with you guys.” And he did! The first place he booked us into was the El Morocco, which was one of the top nightclubs in Montreal at that time. We got into a little room upstairs; they had a little cocktail lounge, and we stayed there for months!

Had the calypso craze in the US already started by that time? Was that where he saw the potential?

No, it was just before that craze, and of course the craze really became big when Belafonte came out. A lot of people don’t like Belafonte—Trinidadians, I should say—do not like to give a lot of credit to Belafonte. But you have to give a lot of credit to Belafonte because he is the one who really brought it the forefront when he made his first album with “Day-O” and “Jamaica Farewell” and that kind of thing.

He raised the profile.

He raised the bar real high. What became a sort of a downplay from Belafonte, which a lot of people didn’t like and I still up to today don’t like it: because he realized—and truthfully so—that he was not in truth a calypso singer; he said he was a folk singer…you see, a lot of people still don’t understand, to be a calypso singer, it doesn’t mean that you sing calypso. It means that you write your own songs and you sing your songs. Anybody can sing a song, you know, Dean Martin can sing anybody’s song, and so can anybody else sing anybody else song.

Right! He made Island in the Sun down in Trinidad & Tobago. He got a good cut-arse, in case you don’t know, in a bar in the islands. He thought he was so tough, and he decided to fool around with a guy, and the guy beat the hell out of him!

Probably wasn’t the first time Robert Mitchum got beat up…

Right, yes—he was a rough-and-tumble kind of guy! And in those days what happened is, our band, because…the guy at the agency was called Eldon, Eldon Associates, it was a Jewish agency, and he was very good. And he realized that the steeldrum was an unknown factor, so he called it “The Steel Bandits.”

So that was his idea for the name?

Yes. He said, no, this calypso is not good enough, put it as The Steel Bandits. And the singer, this boy Duval, he gave him a stage name also: he gave him the name of “King Caribe.” Because in those days, every calypsonian had a name, like Lord Caresser, the Mighty Terror, the Duke of Iron, and Barracuda, and so on and so on. So he gave him a name too. So Ken became King Caribe, and the band became the Steel Bandits.

And when did you become “The Bandit”?

L-R: Dave de Castro, Allan de Montbrun, Ken Duval, Eddy Edgehill

Well, here’s what happened—this is a funny story. Ken’s father was a councilman, he was in the legislative council, the government, and when he first found out that his son was playing calypso in Canada…don’t forget: in the islands, it was not [accepted] that white fellows, or fellows of any class should be playing calypso in steelbands…the stigma was a terrible stigma, both for calypso and steeldrums guys. That is why a lot of the white guys that played steelband music were ostracized from their family completely. And a lot of them still made it—fellows like Sello Gomes and Oscar Fusca and a lot of them—you were considered low class. A steelband man and a calypsonian, they were figured, these were the dregs of the society. These were the guys that went out having fun, drinking, running women, doing all of the terrible things that one should not do.

Even in the fifties they still had that reputation?

Oh yes. So when this councilman found out that his son, his lovely son, was in Canada playing calypso music, he told him, “You get home right away! Get outta there, you come home now!” So Ken came and said, “Listen, Daddy wants me home.” So I said, “You’re a big man!” And he said, “Yeah, but I can’t tell Daddy no.”

And so you took over?

Yeah, so he left! He had to go, he says, “Daddy says, Come home now,” he says, “what am I gonna do?” I says, “Tell Daddy forget it!” And he says, “No, I gotta go.” Well, he left!

You’re two thousand miles away!

This is what I mean! And you know, up to this day he regrets it, would you believe that? I still see him every time I go to Trinidad, and he says to me, the best year he ever had in his entire life was that year he did that. It was a lot of fun.

So he’s around, too—he’s back in Trinidad?

Yeah, he’s still alive and well in Trinidad. And then when he left, his brother-in-law, who’s married to his sister, says if he’s leaving, you have to leave the band, too. So in a week’s time, I was able—we had a contract, we were at work, so I kept the contract going. And then the brother-in-law comes to me, and he says, hey Dave, my wife says I gotta leave, too. I say, “What the hell is wrong with you guys?! Your father tells you you gotta leave, now your wife tells you you gotta leave, is that’s what’s going on here?” So he leaves. Then I replaced him with a guitarist, and the same boy Eddy that used to hang around with us, he then came into the band with us. So we formed a different size band: we called it the Calypso Bandits, later the Fabulous Calypso Bandits, and it stayed that way for many years.

And what year was that?

That was…King Caribe and the Steel Bandits went from about the beginning of 55 to about the end of 56, somewhere around there. 57 is when I really came into the picture. I mean I was there all the time, but…

And the really good times lasted through 57 or so?

No, no, it lasted for a long time. We played all over Canada and the United States for many years. It lasted till…68. Then, with Caresser—the reason that I met these guys afterward is because that same cocktail lounge at the El Morocco became very, very popular. And they kept bringing different artists. They brought Caresser in at that time, that’s the first time I’d met Caresser. They also brought Lloyd Thomas, the Mighty Lloyd Thomas. I don’t know if you know anything about him?—but at that time there was a woman called Christine Jorgensen, she was the first man to become a woman.

Thomas wrote that calypso? [I imagined De Castro was alluding to “Is She Is, Or Is She Ain’t?,”penned by Louis Walcott, later Farrakhan. But he was actually referring to another tune inspired by the Jorgensen case, “Sex Changin’,” recorded by Thomas and claimed both by him and by Lord Christo.]

Montreal Gazette 2 January 1957

Well, I’ll tell you a story: [Jorgensen] was performing, you see, at the El Morocco—in the downstairs lounge was a big nightclub, and in the upstairs was the cocktail lounge. So downstairs they would have these different artists, they would have Jackie Gleason, Frankie Lee, and all these big boys. And Christine Jorgensen was there—they brought her in, she was a novelty act; she just sort of came and did a little bit of a strip, then walked around, and that kind of stuff. And she came up one night into the cocktail lounge. And unknowingly, well not unknowingly or knowingly, Lloyd Thomas did not realize that it was a sensitive situation, so he sang that song. And they nearly fired him for it. He says, “Well, I didn’t know; what the hell do I know?—it’s just a song.” That was terrible! [laughs]…[Anyway,] I remember when Lloyd used to sing that. On my days off I would go up into the cocktail lounge; we would hang out a lot there. Then too, of course, at that time, that’s when they had the “clash”—the steelband clash like I told you about, between Rudy [King and us] at the Apollo Theater.

That was a great story![In one of his “Steel Band Clashes,” promoter Art D’Lugoff pitted Rudy King’s 18-piece orchestra against the white “Bandits”–at Harlem’s Apollo. When King’s bandsmen laid eyes on their pale, skinny opponents backstage, they roared with derisive laughter. But the joke was on them: according to De Castro, King’s band died, while the Bandits killed.]

And the first TV show that ever came out of New York was with this Johnny Barracuda [who also took part in the Apollo show], the Duke of Iron, and us. I think that was the very first TV calypso show from out of Trinidad—out of New York. [The program was ABC-TV’s “All About Music,” which aired on April 7, 1957. Not the first appearance of calypso or steelband on American national television, but a significant broadcast, just the same. The Steel Bandits also appeared on the CBC’s “Music Hall” in April 1957.]

You were mainly playing in Montreal, through.

No, also in Quebec. You see, I had different agents. In other words, I got a lot of agents. I had a guy and then sort of drifted away and as I started to go around I didn’t want to give him exclusive and I found out I could get many other agents. I had a lot of agents: I had some in Montreal, some in Quebec City, down in the Caribbean, all over the place, up in Noranda, Rouyn, all these little towns: La Gap, Labelle, all these little places outside of Montreal, all the way up into the mountains, all over. So we worked constantly, but we were constantly moving. Then I had agents in the States that would book me into Boston and New York, we played the small hall in Carnegie Hall, and different places. So I would get a lot of jobs, and then I was fortunate enough to get the Venus de Milo, which then became a home base. So we played the Venus about three, four months a year, and then travelled for the other months, and then come back to the Venus.

All the way through the 60s?

Yes, all through the 60s.

In the US, were you playing the East Coast, mainly, or did you go down to Miami…?

Most of the time we ended up in Miami, and in the Florida area: Sarasota, Miami, Coco Beach, down south. And then we used to go to Boston, and into Falmouth…and on my CD [“‘The Calypso Bandit’ Sings Again” (2001)], there’s a write-up by a guy called Kenn Shah, I don’t know if you ever heard his name. Kenn Shah was very big in the development of the Caribana in Toronto, and he did a write-up for me (he was a friend of mine, I knew him very well), and on the inside of the cover explains that whole story that I’m telling you, where I came from and the different places we played and all that.

So you didn’t get out to Chicago or Los Angeles, say…

No, the furthest place we went was into Columbus, Ohio and into Lorraine. I remember in Columbus, Ohio, the Columbus Plaza Hotel advertised us as the “boys making music on garbage cans.”

That was the hook!

That was the hook, yeah.

Well, what did you guys think about what you were doing: were you just having fun and making a living, or were you filling a demand, or educating people about Trinidadian music, or…?

No, to be quite honest with you: we just felt that we were having a good time and we were promoting—because of the love for the culture that we all had—that we were promoting our culture, and we were having a good time with it, and having fun really. We never did get more serious at making a living and travelling…and in those days the money wasn’t big. So by the time you travelled and you paid your expenses and all—and we all had families, had to send money back home to our families and that kind of thing—we never made any money. As a matter of fact, even in my songwriting, I never made any money with my songwriting, although the Merry Men used a lot of my songs, Byron Lee used my songs. […] One of the things that people know me for is the love of the culture that I have, and I’m still the same way. I mean, I am basically known as a calypso artist. I play calypso music every day of life, I mean I don’t miss a day. I listen to it in my car…one guy told me recently, he says, “You know your problem, Bandit? You’re very prejudiced.” I say, “What do you mean by that?” He say, “You’re prejudiced about your music,” he said, “that’s all you listen to. Why don’t you listen to something else?” [laughs]

And do you listen to a lot of current stuff, too?

No, I don’t. I like a lot of Spanish stuff, though. I speak some Spanish, although it’s very hard to understand when they sing…but I like a lot of Spanish music. Unfortunately, the calypsonian is a dying breed, for the simple reason that now soca is in, and soca is high energy, and the young people like it. So the calypso is basically dying. In other words, a lot of the young generation don’t know anything about it and don’t care, anyhow. Even the Trinidadians, too, they seem to have gone on to the reggae—they like the reggae stuff. So basically, it’s a dying breed: we know it, fellas my age know it. And some of them are still around, but they’re dying off. The younger ones are more like…the big boy now is Machel Montano, and he is good, but he is strictly high-energy soca, that’s all he puts out, and that’s what the young generation wants.

Maybe it’ll come around again.

[Laughs] By that time I’ll be dead and gone, so it doesn’t matter! [Laughs]

So what did you think of the calypso craze when you were in the middle of it? Did you have any problems with how you were being “packaged”?

We loved it, we followed what came up from the islands, and because we travelled so much, to us it was basically party time every night. When I think back on it, I tell my wife, “As soon as you die, Honey, I’m going back into to it again, I don’t care!” [Laughs] My first wife, after 15 years, couldn’t take it any more, of course, cause I was in the music business and running all over the place. She couldn’t take it any more, and that finished that. And I got married a second time, and in the second time, luckily, the band had just broken up about a year [before], I was working, I was a marketing manager in a company, I was doing well, and my second wife told me, “You’re not getting back in this.” [Laughs]

You moved down to Toronto in the 60s?

Yeah, it was 68.

And that’s when you got the job in marketing.

Yes, I started to become “respectable.” And luckily, a friend of mine who played with me from time to time had a company, a big company, and he was able to hire me. And that’s how I ended up in Toronto. And then the Caribana was in the early years. And they decided to put on, in the first time in the Caribana movement, the calypso competition. So then I entered the calypso competition, and then I won the Calypso King that year, that was 69. So I won it in 69, then they didn’t have it again after that at all—those competitions, they didn’t have them again until somewhere back in the 80s, it became popular again, and a guy called “Smokey” came on it in the 80s, so there was quite a controversy of Who was the first calypso king of Canada—was it the guy that won in the 80s, or was it the guy that won in 69? And of course, obviously, 69 comes before 80, so… [Laughs] Of course, Smokey was most upset, because…they didn’t know about it! They didn’t even know that in the old days they had…there’s a lot of that old history of when Caribana started at first that nobody has written about, that’s coming out now piece by piece by piece.

Toronto Star 5 November 1955

The novelist Lawrence Hill wrote a historical booklet for the Canadian Negro Women’s Association (CANEWA), which was active back in the 50s. And they started what they called a “Calypso Carnival” in Toronto in 55 or 56, and held it annually for several years—it was basically just a big dance, they would rent a hall and all the West Indians in Toronto would get together and have a party. And that, he says, morphed into Caribana: it disappeared for a couple of years in the early 60s and then some of the same people who had been involved with this Calypso Carnival came back and kind of laid the foundation for Caribana.

Well I hate to tell you: nobody knows that story, cause I’ve never heard that story before. I’m around these kind of conversations…[and] this the first time I’ve heard about that. Because when anybody talks about Caribana, they talk about Caribana starting in 1967.

This other thing started in 55 or 56 and it went through, I want to say, 63 or 64. [Hill dates it to 1956, though the ad at right suggests that the same “carnival,” sponsored by CANEWA, goes back to at least 1955.]

That’s interesting: nobody knows that…Lennox Borrell is a[nother] guy that goes way back also into the days of Montreal with me. Because he had a little band at that time also, and he ended up as a university professor in one of the big universities in Toronto, and … he is still so involved in the Caribana movement that he has been a judge for the competition for the last, oh, how many years, I don’t know. So he’s been very entrenched with it also, from in the early days.

And he started in Montreal too?

He started in Montreal, too, yes. He had a little steelband there, and he travelled, too, cause the way to get some money was to get a move on with different agents. He didn’t travel half as much as us—he had a band, it was a bigger band, and it was basically a steel band.

So how much did you mix with the other West Indians in Montreal?

Well, the reason we mixed a lot with them is because they knew we were the only band in town, so they came to us, rather than we going to them. Because especially the Venus de Milo—the beauty in those days is that these clubs were cocktail lounges, where you sat down and you listened to the entertainment; there was no dancing and monkey business like you have today. You sat—it was a show: you went there, you had a drink, you sat down, you listened to the show, you left, you came back, whatever the story is. That atmosphere was always there. That lasted for many years. Of course, then the Go-Go dancers came in, and then that was it, brother. That basically killed us. Everybody was flocking to see these little girls shake-up and their breasts movement and all that.

I’m sure that sort of entertainment has its charms, too!

[Laughs] Yes, I’m sure it does! But because it was such a novelty in those days, seeing a woman’s breast exposed in a club was a novelty, in those days that wasn’t commonplace at all, when this came along every little girl got involved in this thing, it was an easy way for them to make money. Because even the bands started to put them into the bands and all that kind of stuff. So there was a lot of things going on at that time, and of course the novelty of the calypso started to fade, because the folk singing now became a big thing—Peter, Paul, and Mary and all these folks. There was a guy called Marvin Burke [who] became very popular singing folk songs. And he took over our home base, really: so it used to be, he would get into the club for a couple of months, then we would get it back for a couple of months, and it would shift back and forth. Cause you always need a home base where you can stay at least for a couple of months, and then move on again.

So after calypso it was folk music and then it was rock and roll.

Yes, and then the rock and roll came in. And I’m sorry to see the rock and roll go because at least rock and roll had some dancing to it: there was camaderie, and you could get in front of a girl and move around. But like they say, life changes and that’s it. […] Then, too, they had of course, the University of Montreal, a lot of West Indians, especially Trinidadians went there too. And that’s where Stokely Carmichael came out from, if you remember that…

I know that the students there–and at McGill and Sir George Williams–formed an association, and they used to have a carnival, too.

They would put on a big dance. As a matter of fact, we played for some of their dances, because it was strictly calypso music, so everybody could dance to it. Every year they had that, until the last year, when we played, a big fight broke out, and they said they don’t want us again. [Laughs]

Like it was your fault!

[Laughs] Some white fellows came from Verdun and started some trouble and before you know it, they ended up fighting with our band, and we were in the fight so they figured it was our fault, and they said we don’t ever want to see you again—go back, get out. That might have been 58? Somewhere around 58, 59 maybe, I really can’t remember.

How well did you get to know any of the other West Indian entertainers who were based in or came through Montreal? Did you get to know Caresser at all, or Lloyd Thomas?

No, I just met up with Caresser because he played at the same place. No, at that time, a lot of entertainers weren’t really passing through Montreal. There were very few musicians in Montreal; a lot of little bands like mine started coming up. There was another guy called Ralph Egard, he started a little band, too. The only other guy I met in those days that passed through Montreal was Nello, Lord Nelson. And then, too, a lot of times I was out of town even if they did pass through. But there was not a big influx of calypso singers here; they did that mostly in England, I understand—they got Kitchener and different people; there was quite a movement—but in Montreal they didn’t have too much of that. And of course at that time, too, there was a big Haitian influence. Because in Haiti they speak French and the French people like that, so a lot of Haitian bands came up and were playing a lot of Haitian music. They like the beat of the Haitian music, the French people. And eventually, that is why there are a lot of Haitians in Montreal, because the government, when they changed the law of the land to French, Haiti was allowed to send their people there because they speak French. So they would take preference over the Haitian rather than the Jamaican or the Trinidadian or anybody else.

So Thomas and Creator and those guys—you didn’t really know them much.

No, I met with them. But I never hung around them, because they didn’t stay long: they came, they gave a gig or two, and they went. Lloyd Thomas, he worked out of New York. Same thing with Barracuda, he was in New York, too. Duke of Iron, too. These boys all were coming out of New York. […] Later on, when Caribana started in 67—67, 68, 69—after about 69, they realized that the Caribana could do very well by importing the acts out of…putting on big shows and bringing them from Trinidad. And up till today, that is still very prominent…Now of course, every year, they all come up. Whether it’s Roy Cape, Melody, Sparrow, Baron, a lot of—David Rudder lives there.

Not long after I got here I was in a barber shop, and another guy waiting for a cut turned out to be a retired immigration official from Niagara Falls. And he was regaling me with stories about how on the Amtrak train, entire trainloads full of West Indians from New York would come up for Caribana: they would take over the train, he said, and it was just one big party.

Don’t forget, the Caribana has been going for about 44, 45 years. It’s been a long time. I suppose they’ve had their troubles…but one of the unfortunate things that happens with these things is you always hear about the misappropriation of moneys, they imply that money has been stolen…but what they don’t tell you is the misappropriation of moneys is a very, very small percentage of how much it costs to put this damn thing on. And a lot of the cost is borne by the volunteers who don’t get paid, so they get a drink of beer here and there, but all his labor is free, all the workers for the bands—all that’s free money.

I can’t imagine anyone’s getting rich putting on carnival.

[Laughs] Yeah, and this is one of the fallacies—that is why these organizations are falling apart, both in Florida, in Orlando and all over the place, they’re dying, because they always think there’s money: they start it up, and then somebody else jumps in and thinks there’s money and before you know it it’s broke up into three parts, and the one part can’t [inaudible]…so even carnivals in the different cities across the United States, the government is getting tired of it, they’re not helping promote it, because they don’t see it as a viable entity for their constituents or their people to partake of it, and they put them in some backroads and the thing becomes a mess.

The carnival I’m most familiar with is Brooklyn, and I know to this day the New York politicians will come out and march at the head of the parade for a few blocks, just to get their picture in the paper, but the city isn’t giving those guys any money—it’s mainly segregated onto Eastern Parkway; they’re allowed to have their day and that’s about it.

The whole idea is Get On and Get Out. Even in Toronto: Toronto is very fortunate—the government has helped them out but it has taken years for the government to get involved. And when the government gives them the thing…it’s a pittance. It’s only now that they’re really starting to realize how much this thing makes and how much it costs and therefore give them a little more. But the money does not flow like water like people [inaudible]. But the average person in the street, who’s not involved in it, thinks “Well the government gave them $100,000.” Yeah, it gave $100,000 and it cost $300,000 to put it on.

Were you sort of a novelty because of your light skin?

Yes, definitely. Definitely. That was a big [advantage] too. We were able to get into a lot of doors that other people couldn’t get into. Doors opened up very easily for us.

So when people heard “Trinidad” they were expecting to see black guys.

They were expecting to see black people, and they were shocked. They would say, “Are you sure you’re from Trinidad?” But they liked the music, and for the club owner, in the bigger clubs, he felt more comfortable with us, obviously. And most of the clubs we played in, we played to white people, we didn’t play to West Indians. Cause there was no money playing to the West Indians.

Even the clubs in the other end of town: I’ve seen pictures of Caresser playing at Rockhead’s Paradise in the late 40s and early 50s and all of the people there in the cocktail bar are white folks.

Well, this is it. Now, you have to know the story about Rockhead’s: we played at Rockhead’s many times, too. Rockhead was a black Jamaican man who opened up this club. But he brought in all his acts out of New York, he wanted high-class entertainers: Benny King, B.B. King…groups out of Chicago and New York and that kind of stuff. And then he had a little cocktail lounge downstairs, and in the cocktail lounge we would play or Caresser would play. And you would find out that one of Rockhead’s things is, he really enjoys the white people to come to his club, because as you walked through the door, he would hand every lady a rose, every night he would stand there, and he would hand them a rose. So he created a clientele of…even some of the blacks that came were of a higher class. Because the drinks were more expensive, it was not a cheap club by any means, so you had to have some money to go see those shows.

So he was running a high-class joint.

He was running a high-class joint, yes. And then he had the little cocktail lounge downstairs which could take anything you want. You could pick up whatever money you could pick up downstairs. But [even the cocktail lounge] was not cheap. And then he had another place called the 99 around the corner from him that was predominantly a little black place where there was cheap liquor.

He covered all the bases.

Yeah. Well, he didn’t own the 99, actually; the 99 was owned by somebody else that competed against him. It was a little dive, and his was a high-class club. I mean, you would walk into Rockhead’s Paradise, and he had a bouncer there, and he would tolerate absolutely no nonsense in that club, especially if you interfered with his white clientele, let me tell you.

Apparently Rockhead feuded with the city fathers, though.

Yes. He had problems with them because they knew that there was a percentage of prostitution going on from there. And there were batty men there, too—it was a big club.

From everything I read about Montreal in the 30s and 40s and early 50s—that just seems like it’s par for the course.

[Laughs] Yes—that’s why it was great! I mean, I would go and see…B.B. King at 4 o’clock in the morning. It was wide open.

No other city in Canada like that.

No, no—the others closed up tight. The only other city I saw that could match that was two cities, Noranda and in Rouyn. Those places—they closed the doors at 5 o’clock in the morning and people were still coming in drinking. Unbelievable. And the places packed. Small towns, but they were mining towns, okay? That was a different animal up there. And up in Sept-Iles and these places, the law didn’t bother these places, they let them go till 2, 3; and once they closed the doors—the whole idea was, close the doors, but then you let your friends in, or whatever they want to do inside.

I’ve got a feeling you’ve got endless stories, if I could keep you on the line forever…

Well, I’ll send you my book and you can read a couple of them in the book. You’ll read stories about fights and that kind of stuff, there’s a lot of those.

It’s great talking to you—you’re very kind to take so much time.

I always have the time. The way I live my life, I don’t live like other people: I eat when I’m hungry, I sleep when I’m sleepy, time means absolutely nothing to me because it doesn’t control me, I control it. So I’m very, very fortunate. I’m not regimented: my wife eats at 6:00, I eat at 9:00. I’m very contented.

The first anniversary of this blog came and went unmarked, and I blame it on Ray Funk, who’s been cracking the whip to get me to finish editing his manuscript for the book portion of a planned “Calypso Craze” box set for Bear Family records. (I’m working as fast as I can, Ray!) On a wee-hours-of-the-morning break from these labors—my way of making lemonade from the lemons of post-Thanksgiving Day insomnia—I discovered, courtesy of the “On This Day in Jazz Age Music” blog, that I’d just missed another anniversary: the birthday of Wilmoth Houdini, who was supposedly born on November 25th, 1895 in Port of Spain. (He rests in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.)

Houdini himself wrote some fine calypsos about food (cf. “Hot Dogs Made Their Name”), but I’ll commemorate his birthday with an excerpt from Caresser’s calypso “Thanksgiving,” written in Canada in the late 1940s:

From early morn till evening
It was real rejoicing and feasting
[…]
I couldn’t even walk talk nor dance
I ate until I fell into a trance.

CHORUS: So much to drink so much to eat
I wish they keep it three times a week

I love my food-centered holidays, but once a year’s enough for me, thanks. Now if you’ll excuse me: I’m going to take some Alka-Seltzer and get back to work. (Soon come, Ray!)

The good folks at McMaster University’s Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, where I spent last fall as Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies, edit an online “Working Papers” series showcasing work by faculty, graduate students, and invited guests of the Institute. (If you need to be convinced that it’s worth your while to check out this excellent series and you’re the sort who’s persuaded by name-dropping, then I’ll just mention that the more illustrious contributors include big guns like Arif Dirlik, Hardt and Negri, and Etienne Balibar.)

These same good people were kind enough to see some merit in a draft article that grew out of my research there, which was about the cultural work performed by calypso in the decades before the great West Indian migrations that began in the 1960s. The piece is called “Calypso’s Cosmopolitan Strategy: Race, Nation, and Global Culture in Postwar Canada” and you can download it here.

Department of Contorted Rationales: let’s say that with two weeks officially left of my sabbatical, I’m still in Canada in spirit. The Habs are all tied up with the Penguins in the latest round of the NHL playoffs (has anyone thought to tell the National Hockey League that IT’S MAY?!?). The franchise is once again the property of the Molson family, whose multinational megacorp is now known as Molson Coors, thank you very much—though they’ve made a big show of emphasizing their “heritage” and retaining “Molson Canadian” as their flagship beer. And Google News Archive has thoughtfully offered up one more utterly unlikely point of connection between two of my favorite subjects. (For the first one, see “A Life of Craft Beer and Calypso.”)

This has to be one of the most inexplicable print ads I’ve ever seen. Emphasis on “print”: all words, no pix—not even a tiny logo hiding in a corner somewhere. Unless you read it all the way through, you wouldn’t even realize it was an ad. Oh sure, that might not strike you as all that remarkable if I’d pulled the thing out of last month’s, I dunno, Wired: these days, sophisticated modern marketers are always experimenting with edgy, ironic, anti-ad ads. But this one’s over a half-century old:

Montreal Gazette, 15 April 1954, p. 4

O-kayyy…Let’s overlook the stage-West Indian ahccent and the religio-geographic confusion. (The Trinidadian version of Yoruba Orisha-based religion was more commonly known as Shango, though the folk practices of Obeah also derive from some of the same sources.) Keep in mind that as far as I know, Molson’s, unlike some other prominent Canadian companies—Alcan, Sun Life Insurance—did not have an especially big presence in the Caribbean and had not otherwise established any relationship with West Indian culture at home or abroad. In 1954, in fact, there was no real reason to do so: Belafonte was not yet a household name; the Calypso Craze was more than two years off; even Princess Margaret’s “Calypso Tour” of the Caribbean, which got mad press in Canada (and the rest of the English-speaking world), wouldn’t happen till the following year. A Trinidad steelband, the Dixie Stars, would feature prominently that summer at the Canadian National Exhibition, but that was August, four months away. Really, the only West Indian of note to have established a beachhead in Canada was Lord Caresser, and in 1954, his days on the CBC and at Rockhead’s Paradise both past, he was apparently off on a tour in Europe. (He’d be back in Montreal clubs by 1955.) Sure, more and more Canadian tourists were jetting off to the Caribbean by this point, but were there enough of them “Mahd about Trinidahd” to give an ad like this any kind of currency? It’s a mystery.

Molson's and curling (not calypso)

At right is another Molson’s ad from the same period that plays up a much more typical association, with one of those pastimes that even in 2010 made Canada the butt of Olympic jokes on American late-night TV.

Back in the late 1970s and early 80s, the heyday of the Canadian “stubby” bottle, my brother and his family lived for several years just outside of Sarnia, Ontario. This period also coincided with the dark ages of American beer, a decade or so before the dawn of the microbrewing renaissance. And so whenever we went for visits, it was with great anticipation that we would make a pilgrimage to what was then known as Brewer’s Retail, the slightly creepy, bare-walled, government-licensed beer store, to acquire a case or two of exotic Molson’s Canadian, or Stock Ale, or Export, or Brador, all of which counted as tasty, characterful alternatives (relatively speaking) to the pallid swill that passed for beer on our side of the Blue Water Bridge. Nowadays, the True North’s mass-market brands vie with their American cousins for the title of coldest, “lightest,” and blandest. (Or just as often, they’ve ended the contest by merging with their Stateside competition, and/or with some other global brewing gargantua. They got themselves some spiffy new-old graphic design as part of the bargain, however.) Thankfully, craft brewing is thriving in Canada, too. So keep your Molson’s; make mine a Lug Tread, or a Dead Elephant, or a Steam Whistle, or a 10W30, or a Granite Best Bitter Special, or a Black Oak Pale, or a Black Irish Plain Porter, or a Wellington Iron Duke, or a Church Key Holy Smoke, or a…you get the idea. But Go Habs!

Like this:

Until the mid-1960s, Canada severely restricted immigration by black West Indians—and, for that matter, all other people of color. About West Indian students, who came into the country on temporary visas, officials were a bit less wary. Historian Robin Winks notes that after World War II, “thousands of black-skinned students,” including hundreds of West Indians, enrolled in Canadian Universities. (As always, Montreal and Toronto had some of the greatest numbers.)

Montreal Gazette, 23 August 1946, p. 7

In December 1945, the CBC’s International Service, then in its first year of operation, recorded special Christmas broadcasts for many of its overseas audiences. For the British West Indies, according to an article in the Montreal Gazette (22 December, p. 18), it prepared a “program of calypsos and songs, featuring calypso singing…by 15 students from those islands, who are now studying at McGill University.” Some of those same students were undoubtedly recruited to perform as the “Tamboo-Bamboo Boys,” a trio of backup singers who appeared on the CBC’s “Lord Caresser Show” during its first year. They may also have been part of the quartet Caresser led at McGill’s “Cafe Copacabana” in late 1947.

For his part, Caresser seems to have had more than just a casual relationship with McGill. One of his earliest Canadian compositions was his “Ode to McGill University,” a/k/a “McGill Song” and “My Name I Want to Enroll (at McGill),” which told of his ambition—fictional, according to his sons—to become a psychology student there:

Yesterday I went at the campus gate
But the Registrar told me: “It’s too late
You must be [sic] pay a fee.” I said: “Oh No,
My budget is low; I’ll sing Calypso.”

In his own version of “Donkey City,” he spun this somewhat less celebratory tale of a Caribbean émigré’s icy reception:

I land in Montreal City
Prepared to study
At McGill University,
Far away from the land of Iere
I thought I was big and robus[’]
‘Till I feel the breeze on the Campus
I said No,
Too much snow
for this Junior Commando

But there’s one thing that you should know
They even sang Creole Calypso
Inviting Canadians if you please,
To holiday in the West Indies.

I enjoyed the show all along
More so when they sang the calypso song
I hope soon all Canadians would be
Singing this tropical melody.

From the collection of Canada's Department of Manpower & Immigration at Library & Archives Canada: "West Indian students in Montreal celebrated the anniversary of the West Indies Federation with exhibitions of limbo, voodoo and calypso dances at the Negro Community Centre"

Those same West Indian students from McGill and Sir George Williams (now Concordia) universities regularly held dances and fêtes in Montreal, including annual “carnivals.” The photo at right, probably from 1959, depicts just such a celebration. (The event’s location, Montreal’s storied Negro Community Centre, still exists as the NCC/Charles H. Este Cultural Center—though sadly the building has been closed for 15 years, awaiting sufficient funds for renovation.)

David “Bandit” DeCastro, Canada’s first calypso monarch (1969) and founder of the 1950s/60s Montreal-based group “King Caribe and the Steel Bandits,” tells a story in his self-published book of reminiscences about playing for one such party, organized by students he says were from the University of Montreal—he may have meant McGill—in about 1958 or 59. (Although he did not come to Montreal as a student himself, he got the idea to form the Steel Bandits while liming in an apartment belonging to some West Indian students in his neighborhood.) Here is the version that he told me in conversation late last fall:

Then, too, they had the University of Montreal: a lot of West Indians, especially Trinidadians went there too. They would put on a big dance. As a matter of fact, we played for some of their dances, because it was strictly calypso music, so everybody could dance to it. Every year they had that, until the last year, when we played, a big fight broke out, and they said they don’t want us again. Like it was our fault! Some white fellows came from Verdun and started some trouble and before you know it, they ended up fighting with our band, and we were in the fight so they figured it was our fault, and they said “We don’t ever want to see you again—go back, get out!”

L-R: Lord Caresser, Atilla the Hun, The Lion, and Lord Executor in a publicity shot for their New York visit, 1937

Lord Caresser (Rufus Callender, 1910-1976) was part of an elite group of Trinidadian calypsonians who in the mid-1930s were selected (by A&R man Ralph Perez, along with Trinidadian retailer and entrepreneur Eduardo Sa Gomes) to make annual trips to the U.S. to wax sides for Decca Records. In 1937, singing at the fashionable Ruban Bleu in Manhattan, he had a breakout hit with “Edward VIII,” a dirge-like composition on the December 1936 abdication of the British monarch (“It was love, love alone / That caused King Edward to leave the throne”). His recording of the tune went on to become an international sensation, the top-selling calypso of the year outside of Trinidad. (See “Calypso Boom,” Time August 29, 1938.)

Although his success ensured that Caresser would be invited to record again for Decca over the next three years, his output on disc was not quite as prolific as that of some of his contemporaries. And the Virgin Islands Daily News was probably burnishing his resume a bit when it claimed in November 1945, on the occasion of his stopover there en route to New York to “fill engagements on stage and radio during the winter,” that Caresser had “been entertaining crowds in New York and California night clubs every winter since 1936.” (During that year’s carnival season, according to Eddy Grant, he had sung at the House of Lords tent with Lady Iere, Lord Ziegfield, and a very young Lord Kitchener.)

Virgin Island Daily News, 14 November 1945 (p. 2)

Just the same, Caresser traveled early and often in pursuit of his art, and the cosmopolitan persona he assumed in his calypsos was no mere fabrication. What precisely led him on a long sojourn in Montreal, however, is a matter of some speculation. The town certainly had a lively nightclub scene, centered around a neighborhood sometimes known as “Montreal’s ‘Harlem’” (today’s St. Antoine or “Little Burgundy” district), a regular stop on the North American circuit for black and white entertainers alike, especially jazz musicians. It also had a significant Caribbean presence: by World War II, according to one source, West Indians represented some 40% of Montreal’s black population, which numbered in the low thousands.

A somewhat fanciful autobiographical calypso that Caresser wrote in Montreal tells of his unrealized ambition to matriculate at McGill University and study psychology. In a 1948 story in the Afro-American, he claims to have been “inspired to visit Canada in an endeavor to broaden the calypsos [sic] field and increase its sphere of influence on the Continent.” What made him stay, however, seems to have been a commission from Kenneth Brown, producer for West Indian programs at the CBC’s fledgling International Service, to host a radio program that wound up being broadcast not just to the West Indies, but to much of the rest of the anglophone world, as well. (Caresser was heard domestically on the CBC’s flagship Trans-Canada network, in the West Indies on CBC International, and by relay on the BBC, the ABC, New Zealand broadcasting, and occasionally the SABC.) Although it moved around from night to night and even spent a brief spell on CBC’s “Dominion” network (which would eventually become Radio 2), the “Lord Caresser Show” ran nearly every week from May 1946 through June 1948, and Caresser made occasional appearances on children’s and folk music programs on the CBC as late as 1952. While he sometimes performed solo, he was often accompanied by the “Tamboo Bamboo Boys” (West Indian Students at McGill) or, later in the show’s run, by other backup singers from the islands.

Ray Funk relates that in his 1951 calypso “Tribute to Kitchener,” Lord Melody ribbed Caresser (along with several other expatriate calypsonians), suggesting that it might be time to come back home to refresh his repertoire:

Caresser should take a rest
And fly back to the city of Port-of-Spain.
We waiting so come by plane
We don’t want to hear them old songs again
When I turn on me radio Saturday night
Caresser singing, myself and me girl in fight
She like it but I don’t like it at all
and as if he does hear we and start to bawl:

Chorus:
(mute ) I’m the Lord Caresser the king of hearts
And I’m living among the aristocrats
And all those people over there
All they studying is obeah
So the more they try to do me bad, etc.

Melody’s chorus quotes from Caresser’s radio theme song, adapted from his 1938 signature tune, “The More They Try to Do Me Bad,” in which the cosmopolitan calypsonian, um, lords it over his homebound compatriots. But in Canada he was also writing sheafs of new material, much of which—tunes like an “Ode” to Canadian Olympic figure skater Barbara Ann Scott, for example, or homilies on Thanksgiving and the Santa Claus Parade—addressed local themes. He surely needed a thick songbook once he became a fixture in Montreal’s nightclubs, most notably during a three-year run (May 1949 through April 1952) in the downstairs bar at the renowned Rockhead’s Paradise, owned and operated by Jamaican-born Rufus Rockhead since 1931.

Ads for Rockhead's Paradise in the Montreal Gazette, October 4th (L) and November 28th (R), 1951

Caresser never headlined in the main room and he got photo billing in the club’s newspaper advertisements only at the beginning and end of his run. But he had a loyal following nevertheless, as Weekend Magazine‘s caption, left, and the ad, below right, would suggest. Rufus Rockhead, moreover, was famously exacting with respect to the talent he booked, and the sheer length of Caresser’s stay—almost three solid years of nightly performances—implies an extraordinary degree of confidence and devotion on the part of his demanding employer.

While Rockhead’s itself didn’t publicly mark Caresser’s eventual departure, the Montreal Gazette’s entertainment page ran a photo, two weeks after his disappearance, of his successor in the downstairs bar, one “Orlando, singer, pianist, and harpist,” apparently finding it newsworthy that (as the caption announced) he was “Replacing Lord Caresser.”

Where Caresser went after April 1952 is somewhat unclear: the indefinitely postponed trip to Paris (see ad, right)—a honeymoon trip—doubtless accounted for part of the time, and he returned to Europe at least once more in the 50s, as well. (He’d made an earlier trip in 1948 and 49, appearing on the BBC and recording two unreleased sides for the Swedish jazz label Sonora.) But by mid-1955 at the latest he was back in Montreal, serving as the advance guard of the imminent North American Calypso Craze.

After a gig at the Down Beat in 1955, he began a long run with his trio (later augmented by the addition of “The Lady Venus,” a dancer) at the De Milo Room of the Venus Restaurant sometime in the forepart of 1956, and he stayed there through the end of the year. By January 1957, the Virgin Islands singer Lloyd Thomas, just in from New York’s Jamaican Room, had taken over at the De Milo (now proudly billing itself as “Montreal’s First Calypso Room” and/or “Montreal’s Home of Calypso”), and Trinidadian King Caribe & His Steel Bandits and a trio led by the English comedian Lance Percival (performing as “Lord Lance”) had finished a double bill at El Morocco. Caresser moved on, first to the Clover Lounge (“You’ve Heard the Rest! Now Hear the Best!” crowed the Clover’s ads) and then in mid-May to the Continental Lounge, having done a one-off performance at that venue’s “Ballroom” back in February.

Thomas, Caribe, and Caresser, along with one latecomer, the Trini-born, Jamaica-based Lord Creator, were Montreal’s calypso mainstays for the duration of the craze, which more or less ran its course by the end of July. They made the rounds of the Montreal clubs, playing variously at the Clover Lounge, the De Milo Room, El Morocco’s Casbah Room, and the “Penthouse” of the Windsor Steak House. (Lord Lance returned for a week at the Casbah in March, while Montreal-based acts such as The Magnetones were also pressed into service at the peak of the fad.) As the boom turned bust and the more established rooms began to abandon the calypso format, other venues such as Dagwood’s and the Manor House Barn belatedly jumped on the bandwagon, often with locally manufactured talent.

Caresser’s life after this period is generally not well documented. His contemporary Atilla the Hun (Raymond Quevedo, one of the towering figures in calypso’s history), writing in 1958, claimed in passing that he was—once again—in Paris. Even so, the Montreal city directory puts him at home in La Belle Ville, where he had married and started a family, every year through 1965—listing him for the last five of those years as an employee of the Industrial Acceptance Corporation, a finance company. I’ll update this post as I find out more.

Montreal Gazette, 19 September 1956

After 1962, when Canada’s overtly racist immigration laws were reformed, greater and greater numbers of West Indians settled in the country, most notably in Toronto, and calypso too established an indigenous Canadian presence. That’s a story which, along with its broader contexts, I’m content to leave to others.